Tuesday, 15 November 2011

food glorious food

It probably has not escaped your attention that Allen Lim has published a new cook book, with about as much launch hype as a Lady Gaga album, and suspiciously apt timing given that we're approaching the "gifting season" (also known as credit card debt month and coinciding with children pressuring parents into buying crap they dont need and will never use in December) you'd be hard pressed to miss it.

Anyway i've decided to launch my own antidote to such blatant commerical high jinks; the Catalan cooking corner here on insulinandembrocation.com - i'm pretty sure i've got lim licked. I have taken the offseason as a time to sample new foods and not worry too much about macronutrients etc. just keeping my weight under control and my blood glucose nicely in the zone. One of the cool things about racing is all the travel and the great local foods you get to try.

My friend Emily came to stay recently and was impressed with my predilection for Octopus, squid and other cephladops. there's somethign about the little legs that i really like!

Anyway in an attempt to share with you some of my adventures in real food cooking and my longstanding aversion to any food which comes in a rectangular package it hought i would give you a little run through of last night's dinner:

Pies de porc amb mongetesrighto; i'll try to avoid sounding like jamie oliver as much as i can here. First thing you do is soak your beans (sounds euphemistic eh?) for 10 hours or so. I used the big white ones, but you can pretty much freestyle your legume selection.

10 hours later, you've ridden, stretched and had a thouroughly fulfilling day now you're ready for a thouroughly filling meal. So you take your big pot and put in a few glugs of olive oil. 2 choppe dup carrots, an onion and a red pepper. and a lot of garlic. and you cook that on a low flame until it looks suitably brown. then, you break out the big guns; 2 pork feet. in perhaps the oddest cooking experience of my life i made sure to give these little fellas a good shaving before they went in the pot (and yes, that was the last time I used said razor blade). once youve cooked those a little bit add your beans back in (drained obviously) 1 litre of stock, 3 bay leaves and a big branch of rosemary and let it cook for 2ish hours.

once you're done you have a surprisingly yummy concoction. I really like long cooked onions and carrots for some reason (i think its a childhood thing, all those warm stews on cold days). the pigs feet give everything a really nice gelatinous quality and are quite tasty if you like the texture they have. Theyre also damn cheap! you might want to skim off the fat before chowing down as well. Then crack open a good beer and youre away!

seriously though, if we have the temerity to kill another sentient being for food, the very least we can do is appreciate, sit down and enjoy it and make damn sure to use all of it. It's neither good karma nor good recession bustin' frugal practice to let this stuff go to waste. so go out there and make yourself some hearty peasant food (tis the season after all) - i bet if you ate liek this for a month you'd save up enough to buy a Hardback feedzone cookbook